Blue Hawaii

Going to Hawaii without Julia felt peculiar.

Friends since we were eight years old, she slept in my bed every weekend. She went on our family trips. My mother considered her a daughter—sometimes, I felt she liked Julia best.

Always quiet, always reading a book or constructing a story in my head, I referred to Julia as my designated talker. I didn’t know how to behave without following her lead. The cool of her shadow felt blissful to me.

We fell out the year before I moved to the United States. She got in with the popular crowd and ditched me. Then, she said she couldn’t have her graduation party without me. I went. We cried happy tears, embracing. We promised to stay in touch when I went to Princeton.

It was me who became distant once there. I didn’t need my designated talker in class. I shined brighter than I knew I was capable of. Julia’s emails were part inane gossip about teenagers back home who’d snubbed me; part nostalgic recaps of our youth. Eventually I stopped replying.

I was in my third year when I heard Julia was gone forever. It was summer. She’d been on a joyride intoxicated, racing fast, and I’m told her consciousness went too quicksilver to feel. My ghosting her magnified the pain. I felt ashamed. If only both of us could reroute.

I’ve never been close to my brother, Carson, who’s twelve years older. When I was losing teeth he was moving out. But Mom called him about Julia. He and his wife Kaia insisted I come to Oahu. He was visiting in-laws, who’d met me at the wedding in Glasgow.

There was Waikiki, with tiki bar Mai Tais, and cockroaches big as toddlers’ hands scurrying down sidewalks. The gold sand and indigo sea were littered with tourists. On the remote windward side, sands were white as sugar crystals, and rain perpetually dropped into the blue-green ocean. Past that was rainforest, but I wasn’t interested in how big those bugs got. Misty rainbows drenched the city sky too. Verdant mountains loomed in distant fog.

I walked to Chinatown Honolulu alone most days. Maneki-neko ‘beckoning cats’ waved mechanical paws as I downed fishbowl cocktails—coconut rum, vodka, pineapple juice, sweet and sour, blue Curaçao and lemon-lime soda over Nerds candy ‘gravel’ with Swedish gummy fish afloat.

I ate powdered snow of shaved ice, wet with passionfruit syrup and sweet condensed milk. Purple poi glazed donuts made from taro root; poke bowls of raw fish pink as a cactus flower, over sticky rice drizzled with rice vinegar; Meli Kalima ‘honey cream’ pineapples with their pale, sweet flesh; and fresh macadamia nut gelato.

I drank Thai tea with boba pearls; juiced sugarcane; mimosas made with guava juice.

I inhaled the scent of jasmine rice wafting through streets. I liked it fried with kimchi. Don’t tell my Jewish mother, but I most loved kalua pork, covered with banana leaves and slow roasted underground.

Chinatown had everything. A Shinto temple. First Friday bar crawls. Drag queen performances and jazz music.

The thing about grief is it comes in waves. Sometimes you forget a part of you is missing, like a limb, ‘cause some transcendental moment. Then you remember who you most want to share it with.

Julia and I never fought in the eight years we were besties. We never argued, not even playfully. We laughed at the same time, and loved the same songs. There were rumors we were a couple. I didn’t feel that way about her, but I didn’t care that others thought I did. We were thirteen when she became infatuated with boys. That opened the great chasm.

Don’t get me wrong, I had crushes… on famous adults. I fervently read interviews in magazines. But I couldn’t understand what Julia wanted with boys. And I didn’t actually want the men in the posters on my walls, either. I wanted to get inside their heads and reconfigure my thoughts to match the mind frame of a paid artist. Success turned me on. I wanted it for myself.

Julia set me up with a boy once. Colin. He was cute, but I feared boredom and invited Julia on our date. After that, he’d call. I’d keep a list in my notes app of things to talk about, but we’d run out. When he came round my place to kiss me, I got him to kiss Julia instead.

College wasn’t different. I’d drink copious amounts of alcohol to kiss dates, oscillating between disgust and disinterest.

One night stands were my favorite. No kissing, no meeting mothers, just compartmentalized euphoria. Sometimes, men got attached to me when I’d warned them not to. They’d get a look in their eyes. They’d touch me in a way that made my skin crawl. Other times, I’d develop what I thought was a deep friendship with a man, but he’d give me an ultimatum. Either we’d date, or he’d abandon me, not wanting friend zoned. Either way I lost a friend. If I gave in and gave my body to him, the friendship morphed into something I did not want.

I told Kaia I wanted to photograph plumeria. She took me to the Koko Crater Botanical Garden. I hadn’t meant to spill my guts to her, but that’s the kind of person Kaia is. She asks questions. She genuinely listens. People like her are so few and far between, like an oasis in arid stretches of hot white heat. I started talking and couldn’t stop. You could say that’s the silver lining, because if Julia were there she would’ve done all the talking.

I told Kaia I thought Julia was the love of my life, but I wasn’t ever interested in dating her, and I’m not interested in dating anybody, and nothing awful happened to me in my childhood to cause this.

She laughed. Not maliciously, but with mirth. “You’re aromantic,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“What? No. I feel sexual attraction.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to be asexual to be aromantic. And there’s not anything wrong with being either one or both.”

I didn’t know how to feel about this new identity. Don’t people who like to get their rocks off, but feel no romantic love for anyone qualify as antisocial? And how do I stop hurting people? How do I stop feeling like a siren who lures men in and drowns them in their feels?

I did some Googling on my phone as she drove to a quiet beach. There’s a spectrum. There are greyromantics who enjoy intimacy and friendship, but don’t crave more, or want to be in a partnership. Many don’t like kissing.

Julia and I used to look at my mother’s old fashion magazines from the 1990’s. I wanted Kaia to photograph me in my silver slip dress on the beach, and I’d try to replicate that look with my editing software.

There’s something spiritual about salt water. Something so cleansing and baptismal. It feels like entering the womb of Mother Earth, then breaking the surface, gasping for air as you’re reborn. What gets me about the ocean is how deep and vast it is; how it’s brimming full of life but can take yours; how we may never know what exists at the bottom of it. It’s the greatest mystery in the material realm. We can smell it, taste it, touch it, hear it, and see it with our own eyes, but never know it.

I may never fully know myself. Julia knew who I was, but no person is stagnant. And maybe that’s why relationships give me the ick. They seem so confining. If someone loves who I am, I must remain who I am or break their heart. And to be honest, the lack of respect for my autonomy was messing me up. Kaia was the first to tell me no one is entitled to me.

“If men don’t want to be friend zoned, they were never friends of yours. You deserve better,” she said. “Anyone would be lucky to have you as a friend. They just want to bully you into commitment so they can hoard you. They’re not alright with you loving other friends.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“And if you tell men you’re hooking up with that you don’t do relationships, and they choose to believe they can change your mind—or you just haven’t found the right man—they deserve to get their feelings hurt. That’s so manipulative.”

“Wow. You’re right.”

“Of course I am,” she said. “Your brother didn’t marry a fool.”

I smiled in spite of myself. Not feeling so blue anymore. I still miss Julia; the grief still comes in waves. But I’m going to be okay traveling on my own. There’s so much for me to discover.